Comments on: USA Electoral Compass

By: So now who do I vote for? at First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

So now who do I vote for? at First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:51:01 +0000

[...] took the test on the Electoral Compass website mentioned in this Crooked Timber post, and wasn’t at all surprised by the result—of the US presidential candidates, my views are [...]

By: Christian » Comment on USA Electoral Compass by Matthew Shugart

Christian » Comment on USA Electoral Compass by Matthew Shugart — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:27:23 +0000

[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI agree with those upthread who have suggested Political Compass is more accurate. It is far from perfect, but I find it quite plausible. And not only for the USA. For what it is worth, Electoral Compass put me closest to Obama. … [...]

By: Matthew Shugart

Matthew Shugart — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:17:43 +0000

I agree with those upthread who have suggested Political Compass is more accurate. It is far from perfect, but I find it quite plausible. And not only for the USA.

For what it is worth, Electoral Compass put me closest to Obama. But I really do not believe their relative ranking of the candidates—the Dems that is; the Reps’ positions seem OK. I wonder why that is.

Oh, and what “sg” said about the healthcare questions.

By: bernarda

bernarda — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:20:07 +0000

I came up with Mr. Change Something/Anything Obama though I think I am much closer to Edwards. Of course Kucinich was not on the list.

By: Watson Aname

Watson Aname — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:26:20 +0000

Tom, I find the comments in 39 surprising. PCA is a very well known and fairly simple concept, a reasonable undergradute assignment —- so I must assume that “too few people have the combination of statistical and programming skill” should be interpreted as meaning polysci types haven’t paid much attention to basic tools in other disciplines (quite plausible).

However, these sorts of Karhunen-Loève approaches are hardly a silver bullet. There are some strong underlying assumptions and the orthogonality constraint might better be traded for independence (i.e. ICA vs PCA), just off the top of my head. I’m certainly not saying that this sort of approach isn’t interesting to apply to a survey like this.

By: Tom Steinberg

Tom Steinberg — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:22:52 +0000

Can I take this as a moment to remind you of the work of my late, great friend and CrookedTimber regular Chris Lightfoot.

Chris’s fundamentally brilliant realisation about such political quizzes is that the axes on which you mapped the answers were without exeption arbitrary, destroying the validity of nearly any response.

His answer was to derive the axes from a cloud of question results gathered via a polling company from a representative population sample, using principal components analysis. It is a brilliant idea, and I consider it one of the great privileges of my life that I was able to work on that project with him.

The lesson he taught here deserves to be learned, and to be built upon, and any quiz that assumes rather than derives the main axes of political variance should be treated with total suspicion. I suspect that too often it isn’t repeated simply because too few people have the combination of statistical and programming skill to execute it.

Read about it at: http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/

By: Ingrid Robeyns

Ingrid Robeyns — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:50:02 +0000

Laleh (@32), of course I would not simply vote for a woman or a non-white person just like that, but if, among the group of candidates that I would consider voting for (this would rule out Tatcher & Co), there are women or non-whites, then that would play a significant role in my decision. I haven’t followed the US electoral campaign closely enough to know whether I would effectively vote for Obama or Hilary , but I wouldn’t rule it out. One would at least hope that based on her experience Clinton would be able to fix the health care problem, which I would find very important if I were a voter in the US; and the view we get here in the Netherlands is that Obama may perhaps lack the necessary experience to realise this. But again, this is all speculative – I am not suffiently informed.

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:04:20 +0000

Heh—I got “Giuliani,” I’m guessing b/c I’m somewhat classically liberal on economics, and a gun-owner (ironic given that the latter is consistent with a range of liberal positions on social issues which I also hold, and that Rudy is anti-gun). I’m an Anglo in Miami, but I’ll go with the compass and vote for Rudy soon. ;-)

By: dilbert dogbert

dilbert dogbert — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:31:18 +0000

On the issue I feel most strongly about, Getting The Hell Out of Iraq”, I should be supporting Ron Paul. I am not stupid enough for that. I may have mostly neutral feelings about most of the issues the questions covered but in no way does that make me a Ron Paul supporter.
The elephant in the room that is not addressed is our overwhelming support for anything that Israel does. As long as our policy in the Mideast is driven by that fact there is nothing but another century of bad news for us and Israel in the region.

By: Bernard Yomtov

Bernard Yomtov — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:20:04 +0000

“I wouldn’t want to lose the historical chance to vote for a female or black American president, even if on substance, my views apparently are slightly closer to the views of Edwards”. Would you have voted for Thatcher for the same reasons? Or Indira Gandhi, or Golda Meir?

I think it is reasonable to think that electing a black or woman President has enough long-run significance to outweigh a minor policy preference for another candidate. The difference between Edwards and Clinton or Obama is unlikely to have a huge practical effect. Presuming to speak for Ingrid, it’s not as if she’s proposing to vote for Phyllis Schlafly.

By: Martin James

Martin James — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:52:18 +0000

My favorite question was the one about whether better teachers should be paid more than their colleagues. Not just yes, but Hell Yes! I don’t even care if its the bad teachers than make more than the good ones, just pay somebody more so everybody has to suck up for money like the rest of us.

I scored precisely in the middle on the social scale, I got assigned to Ron Paul. There sure is a vacuum of moderation if Ron Paul is what you get for being in the middle on social issues.

Although, I admit I’m not the typical demographic in that I want universal health care and also a tax increase on the poor to pay for it. (After all if they are the ones getting more coverage then shouldn’t they get the added cost. I guess I’m an moderoauthoritybertarian.

I thought the European mindset came out in the lack of questions about race and religion. Little about prayer in schools, ten commandments in public places, affirmative action, etc.

By: SG

SG — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 01:20:12 +0000

I think it has a little problem in the health care section, in that it asks questions about whether the government should provide healthcare, and then asks if employers should be forced to provide healthcare. I indicated that I strongly agree the govt should provide healthcare, and therefore that employers shouldn’t be forced to, and as a consequence I got shifted towards the economic right. Bastards Clearly if you strongly agree that the govt should provide healthcare, your view on whether companies should be forced to becomes irrelevant, or should at least have less weight. They’re confounded variables!

Because of this the compass has me further to the economic right than Hillary Clinton, which I find very hard to believe. That or I’m getting old…

By: Laleh

Laleh — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:00:50 +0000

Ingrid, I can’t believe you’d say, “I wouldn’t want to lose the historical chance to vote for a female or black American president, even if on substance, my views apparently are slightly closer to the views of Edwards”. Would you have voted for Thatcher for the same reasons? Or Indira Gandhi, or Golda Meir? All of them adopting men’s manners to get elected…

And Hillary is really riding on Bill’s coattails (all those people with “I miss Bill” T-shirts). A feminist like you would actually say that it is ok that a woman get elected on the basis of having been married to a former president?

By: Eric

Eric — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:57:40 +0000

Doesn’t the distribution of the candidates on the graph show the problems of a two party system?
I would consider myself liberal in a social as well as an economic sense (the upper-right quadrant), but there’s not exactly a lot of choice in that quadrant… Is it time for a liberal/rightwing version of Ralph Nader?

By: R. Vangala

R. Vangala — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:25:24 +0000

Contrary to other readers, I found the test to be much more reasonable than most of the other online political tests that I have come across (including http://www.politicalcompass.org). One curiosity, however, is that the test indicated that I was closest to Obama on the political landscape, but that I nevertheless was in more “substantive agreement” with Edwards. If you click on the pencil located at your position on the compass, the test offers a breakdown of your position measured relative to those of the other candidates. There I am told that I am in 81% substantive agreement with Obama, but I am also in 83% substantive agreement with Edwards, despite Obama being the candidate “closest” to me. I’m not sure which is supposed to matter more: closeness or level of substantive agreement? Nevertheless, I was happy to see that the test offers issue-by-issue comparisons with each of the candidates, which makes interpreting its positioning more straightforward than doing so for a test like the political compass, which obscures its methods of determining a person’s position on its compass.